An excellent review of automatic weapons for the technically inclined. There is little or no operational history involved, but this book's detailed development histories of weapons and their ammunition is more comprehensive than anything I've seen since Johnson's books from the '40s. If you are into the details of automatic weapons and the ammunition they fire, you must have this book. If you are looking for operational military history of how these weapons were employed, this is not for you.

This book sets a standard that would be hard to beat. The author knows his subject and the production is superb. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the field covered, and to others as an example of how a book should be look.

This book is a very well written history of large caliber automatic weapons. It gives a good coverage of the mechanisms and characteristics of the weapons, but it's real importance to me is it's well illustrated gallery of the rounds used in the weapons, complete with specifications of the rounds and the weapon and country using them, something that is rare to find in other works.In a library of over 1000 volumes on weaponry, this is one of the most used references I have.